In many cases, there is a complex relationship between the features of a good or service, and a buyer's satisfaction with those goods or services. Often, there is no way to find the combination of suppliers, goods, and services, which will best meet an identified need. In these cases, buyers may consult vendors (who are likely to give self-serving assessments of the best match) or independent experts (who, if they are truly independent, have no power to commit vendors to specific performance, and who, though expert, cannot hope to stay perpetually aware of all of the combinations of goods and services which may be offered in the marketplace.) Since it is impossible for buyers to do a complete job of surveying the market place for the best buy, the best fit, or the best set of collaborators to aid in achieving a better negotiating position, and since the cost of performing a due-diligence assessment of alternatives rises sharply with the complexity and number of features considered, buyers often limit their consideration to just a few choices, often buying “packages” that are far from ideal for their needs. Conversely, the lack of buyer selectivity encourages sellers to bundle goods or services in such a way that no individual buyer is optimally satisfied, but the average dissatisfaction of buyers is minimized. The object of the present invention is to permit buyers to exercise greater specificity and selectivity in obtaining goods or services, and simultaneously, for sellers to gain a higher value from the goods or services they offer. It is acknowledged that, initially at least, corporate buyers and sellers may not entrust all negotiations entirely to a software system; even in the case of “human in the loop” negotiations, however, the system will provide tremendous benefit by identifying the top alternatives, portraying the tradeoffs among alternatives, and by providing the software infrastructure to allow users a spectrum of interaction levels from totally manual to totally automatic.
Several attempts have been made at creating a system for matching orders, buyers and sellers and determining market values. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 3,581,072 to Nymeyer discloses a digital computer that matches orders and establishes market prices in an auction market. In Nymeyer, price is the only transaction criteria used to determine compatibility of offers. Nymeyer not does it supply a representation for stating customer's satisfaction levels with possible states of attributes of the product, and fails to provide mutual selection of market properties such as length of offer and protocol as an attribute of the specification. Luke also fails to construct consortia that would gain better prices or valuations, and contains no mechanism to match attributes via inference.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,131,087 to Luke, et al. describes a method for matching and near-matching buyers and sellers, and uses an upper lower and preferred point along each dimension to find solicitations with matching preferred points. Luke is inferior to the current invention in that it does not permit the richness of utility function representation, nor does it support optimal assignments of the whole market, as each offering is considered individually. Luke also fails to provide selection of market properties such as length of offer and protocol as an attribute of the specification. Luke also fails to construct consortia that would gain better prices or valuations, and contains no mechanism to match attributes via inference.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,960,407 to Vivona describes a system for estimating price characteristics of a product from advertisements. It does not use information about successful or feasible transactions in optimal market assignments to inform the price estimate, nor does it supply a representation for stating customer's satisfaction levels with possible states of attributes of the product. Vivona discloses no mechanism for market matching, or automation of market negotiations or transactions.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,414,838, to Kolton, et al. describes a system for extracting historical market data, but does no prediction, and suffers all of the same weaknesses as Vivona.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,038,554 to Vig describes a system to find the market values of “anything or anybody”. Vig is inferior in that it is only concerned with the societal monetary value of entities, rather than the particular (different) valuation that each individual accords a given good. Like Vivona, Vig does not use information about successful or feasible transactions in optimal market assignments to inform the value estimate. Vig also fails to disclose a mechanism for market matching, or automation of market negotiations or transactions.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,151,589 to Aggarwal, et al. discloses a method for performing online auctions and negotiations between buyer and seller. This method is inferior to the present invention in that Aggarwal is suitable only for continuous selling of identical commodities, while the present invention permits markets to be formed a periodically, at mutual demand of buyers and sellers, and supports the automated matching and negotiation for unique offerings or combinations of offerings, using protocols that are mutually specified by buyers and sellers. Aggarwal also fails to construct consortia that would gain better prices or valuations, and contains no mechanism to match attributes via inference.
Therefore, it would be desirable to create a system and method for automatically finding the most advantageous matches between one or more buyers and one or more suppliers of products and services, for negotiating among market participants and for transacting agreements based on those matches, and for using the data from those agreements as a source of market intelligence.